I have a perfectly valid excuse for us never trying the celebrated burger at Holeman & Finch before now. We’re in bed by ten and I used to work Sundays. So there.
Many of our readers seem to hail from Atlanta and are, therefore, possibly familiar with the last six years of silliness surrounding this sandwich. For the benefit of the rest of you, it’s like this. There’s this gastropub that grills exactly two dozen burgers a night, at 10 pm. If you want one, you show up before 9 and hope you made it. They also offer it on Sundays, where the wait can stretch from half an hour to three. I tend to agree with Jimmy from Eat it, Atlanta: this has gone on a bit long now.
Nevertheless, I have been curious for years what this burger tastes like, so when H&F announced they’d be serving it all day on Christmas Eve, Marie and I met there shortly after 1.30. The wait for a table was just over an hour, and then nearly forty more minutes for the burger. The chairs were unbelievably uncomfortable, but at least the deviled eggs were good.
So, this burger. It’s two patties, cheese, onions, and pickles, housemade ketchup and mustard, housemade bread, house-cut fries. The fries are very good, the ketchup is so amazing that I want to take a gallon of it home, and the mustard is as sharp as one of those Ginsu knives they used to sell on TV.
It’s a very, very good burger, and it is priced right at twelve dollars. It is a high-quality burger, to be sure, but I wish that this place was not so small, cramped, and uncomfortable. I like the burger, but I’m not pleased with the conditions one must endure to obtain it. When it’s become more convenient to see a Braves game on a dollar Skyline ticket and get one of these from Holeman & Finch’s second location inside Turner Field at a reasonable time like six, it might be time to let go of the marketing, and just serve the blessed thing at a sensible supper hour, all through the week.
A handful of other blog posts about Holeman & Finch, from the hundreds you can find (so many that I could easily find blogs to which I have never previously linked!):
Anatomy of a Dinner Party (Oct. 31 2009)
Southern Comfort (May 2 2010)
Law & Food (Jan. 28 2011)
Vegas Burger Blog (Jan. 3 2012)
plan d blog (Mar. 8 2013)
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Marie, Let's Eat! 
This is also something on my Atlanta bucket list. The husband’s work place has season tickets for the Braves near that lovely Holeman and Finch booth and oh the smell of them all night was intoxicating when we went last year.
After long waits on a couple of occasions as brunch service starts, we’ve found the key to getting a burger there, in an acceptable time frame, is to arrive around 2:00 on Sunday. Brunch crowds are dying out and you can get in and out reasonably quickly.
The two times I’ve had it I went around 8 pm on a weekday with the intention of enjoying a couple cocktails and appetizers until the burger came out at 10. I sat at the bar and put my burger order in first thing. It was fairly hassle-free.
As for the burger at Turner Field… it’s not the same. It’s amazing for a ballpark burger, but it pales in comparison to the real deal.